Journalism

The Baghdad Bulletin, a struggling but lively English-language publication whose British publishers began working almost immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, offers a range of stories and perspectives about conditions inside the country.

"War, unlike any other news event, asks profound questions of journalists," writes Roy Greenslade in the Guardian. "How do we separate truth from propaganda? How do we overcome the dilemma of political and military leaders controlling access to vital information? What value do we place on what we see on the frontline as against what we are told back at headquarters? ... These questions hovered over last week's Media Guardian forum on war coverage as reporters and desk-bound decision-makers explained how and why they acted as they did.

Clinical trials showed that ViroPharma's anti-cold drug, pleconaril, was little better than a placebo in clinical trials, but that didn't stop hundreds of newspapers from hyping it as a miracle cure. "It fell far short of what any rational person would call a cure," observes Gary Schwitzer. "Yet hundreds of journalists called pleconaril just that - and more - in hundreds of news stories before the drug was ever submitted to the FDA for approval. ... Journalists used an array of superlative terms for the drug -cure, miracle, wonder drug, super drug, a medical first.

Discussing whether the profit making side of the media industry had won out over content, former "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (who was played by Al Pacino in the movie "The Insider") told Australia's Radio National, "It's a situation where the class differential between the people who present, so-called presenters, we call them talent when you work inside the network news organisations, between what they make for instance annually, and what the people who work in the industry make, who actually do most of the reporting and production and writing, is just phenomenal.